Georgetown University. Library

The English College at Liège was one of a number of schools established by the Society of Jesus on the European continent for the education of Roman Catholics who had fled Britain as the result of persecution there. The college was founded about 1616, its first residents being Jesuit novices sent from Louvain for their own safety, followed in a few years by students of philosophy and theology. By 1626 the novitiate had moved on, but the Jesuit "scholastics" remained at Liège until the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. At that time many teachers and students from the Bruges College of the Society (formerly at St. Omer, France) joined those at Liège. Now renamed the English Academy of Liège, the school continued to educate schoolboys and those studying for the priesthood until 1794, when the French Army's advance on Liège prompted the migration of the staff and students to England, which had become by this time less threatening to Catholics. Those teachers and students then settled at Stonyhurst, a country house in Lancashire that became the foundation of Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school that survives to the present day.

From the description of The Liè̀ge Jesuit manuscript text collection, circa 1660-1730. (Georgetown University). WorldCat record id: 173220570